Avant-garde filmmakers have long explored the potential of cinema to afford a visionary experience, exploring the affinities of film with trance, ritual, dream and memory, testing the play of light on the depths of the subconscious. Curators Kathryn Siegel and Sophia Satchell-Baeza’s programme Sisters of the Extreme brings together a series of films by women from the 1960s to the present day, concentrating on work that shares an occult sensibility and a concern with film’s potential to render heightened mental states, from the meditative to the ecstatic.

The Summer of Love. Los Angeles Filmforum commemorates the 50th anniversary of the radical cultural upheaval with an assortment of mind-blowing (as intended) short underground films. These films used a variety of tactics to manifest or assist with perceptual expansion and experience found in sex, drugs, music, and art.  Some pursue idea of psychedelia (Third Eye Butterfly; Doppler Effect: Version II) others express openness in sexuality (Fuses); and others try to capture some of the spirit of group revelry, drug-taking and celebration (Letter to D.H.